Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice" from New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1923): Public domain.
Robert Frost is considered the bard of New England. Casual readers sometimes overlook the depth of his poetry and its technical accomplishment. His apparently simple poems — collected in volumes from A Boy’s Will to In the Clearing — reveal a darker heart upon close reading, and his easy conversational style is propelled by an unfaltering meter and an assiduous sensitivity to the sounds of language.
By Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
By Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And...
By Bertrand N. O. Walker
Hush thee and sleep, little one,
The feathers on thy board sway to and fro;
The shadows reach far downward in the water
The great old owl is waking, day will go.
Rest thee and fear not, little one,
Flitting fireflies come to light you on your way
To the fair land of dreams, while in the grasses
The happy cricket chirps his merry lay.
Tsa-du-meh watches always o’er her little one,
The great owl cannot harm you, slumber on
’Till the pale light comes shooting from the eastward,
And the twitter of the birds says night has gone.
By Ahn Joo Cheol
Faintly remains.
Scarcely remains.
Drops of water form inside my life
as if I cherish a drop of light
just as love is formed inside the word love
just as the word goodbye doesn’t permeate it
it faintly lingers.
A thin part of me remains.
Sometimes inside me...
By Roque Salas Rivera
We have lived on the horizon for so long,
coasts no longer know our flags.
They buried us where they bury ships,
Commonwealth projects, and literary whales,
which represent no threat.
Someday, a great writer will claim
we were an idea the breadth of an ocean
and,...
By Victoria Chang
Agnes only had nine years to live. The angels must have begun to hover around her canvas like monkeys. This canvas has nine white thin strips between the red and blue ones. I’ve spent my life thinking about the blue...
